


Something Like Magic

by Irisen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Gen, HE DIDN'T CRY OKAY, Harry as a tranfiguration genius is one of my favorites, Harry doesn't cry at all, Harry meets new people, Homophobia, I really love Neville okay, Internalized Transphobia, Kind of an OS, Meh, Pre-Hogwarts, The Wizarding World is not Heteronormative, Trans Character, Trans!Harry, Wizards are Queer friendly, and those people are cool, but I have a lot of ideas for a sequel, not even a little, or a chapter 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6142849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irisen/pseuds/Irisen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wizards were nothing like he expected them to be. Well, sure they had the flying brooms, and the ridiculous wands, and all of the silly incantations that were in the children books he used to read... and that was kind of what he thought about when somebody said 'wizard' ... But, even if they were surprisingly predictable on the matter of their wardrobe, said wizards still managed to completely destroy his view of the world.<br/>Until now he thought it was only him, Harry, versus the world.They proved him wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Like Magic

When she’s six, Dudley calls her a boy in front of all of his friends. He says that she isn’t a real girl, that she’s ugly with her short hair and her torn dresses.

Everybody laugh and they call her a ‘tomboy’.

Maybe it’s supposed to hurt her but she doesn’t really feel bad about being different. She hates wearing dresses and having long, beautiful, _pretty_ hair. Besides, all the other girls are stupid and it’s just so funny when people mistake her for a boy.

Well, she always was a little weird anyway, and everyone knew that. It’s just something else to add to her ever growing ‘oddities list’, right under ‘turned her teacher’s wig blue’ and ‘lives in a cupboard and talk to spiders’.

One day, she smiles at Dudley and he doesn’t seem to understand why. He tells her that she’s a freak. Maybe he’s right.

 xXx

When he’s ten, Harry is used to everyone assuming that he’s a girl. It’s not their fault, really, he does look like one with his long, beautiful, _pretty_ hair and his dresses (He doesn’t mind the hair, even if he prefers it much shorter, but the dresses are just horrible).

“What a pretty little girl,” the adults always say, “What’s her name ?”

It’s Harriet, answers Harry. But you can call me Harry, all my friends do that. He's quite good at manipulating grown-ups and, usually, it only takes some cute smiles to make them drop the end of his first name but, sometimes, they don’t want to listen and only laugh at him.

“Sure Harriet, sure.” they say.

He grinds his teeth and smiles at them because he knows that, even if he is Harry in his head, he will always be Harriet to the rest of the world. And Harriet doesn’t strangle people she doesn’t like. It’s improper and no girl should act like this. Ever. 

Some nights, when he can’t sleep and isn’t in the mood to speak to his spiders, he thinks about himself and who he really his. To be honest, he doesn't really know; he thinks he is a boy, most of the time, but he’s young and he can’t be sure. Maybe it will pass.

Deep inside, he knows it will not, he is a boy and he always will be.

So then, he thinks that maybe, somewhere, there are people like him who were boys or girls but didn't look like it. He knows that gay people exists, his uncle complains about them often enough for him to grasp the concept of what exactly an homosexual is, but he never heard about people who were born in the wrong body so he doesn't really believe that he will one day meet someone who understands.

In the end, he has no way of knowing who, or what, he really is and that makes him want to cry.

When he turns eleven, Petunia gives him a blue jean and a pair of old baggy t-shirts and, a few hours later, a giant man destroys the door of the shack he and the Dursleys were sleeping in. He didn't really expect to eat his first birthday cake ever in the company of a scary stranger who can turn people into pigs but life is full of surprises so he takes a slice despite everything.

He get two birthday gifts this day.

He almost cries both times.

 xXx

“Yer okay, Harriet ?” asks Hagrid, peering down at him from under his pink umbrella.

Harry hesitates. He shrugs.

“No it’s just … Can you call me Harry ?”

Hagrid raises a gigantic eyebrow and run a hand through his incredibly thick and almost endless beard (It’s almost bigger than Harry’s upper body).

“… That’s a boy name.” he states, slowly.

Harry gazes down at his feet. If even a giant magic man finds him to be weird, he must really be some kind of freak. A magic freak, sure, but a freak all the sa- …

“Well ye know better, Harry !” suddenly says Hagrid.

He laughs and pats him on the shoulder with the strength of a fast-moving truck which, of course, makes him fall forward and hurt his knees. The pain doesn't stop him from smiling all the way up to the center of London, and, after a, really quick, deliberation with himself, he concludes that, right now, Hagrid is his favourite person in the world.

 xXx

This was the best day in his life, he thinks of it after it ended. Also, he most definitely _did not_ cry.

When they entered the Leaky Cauldron, Hagrid introduced him as ‘Harry’ to everyone, even to the bartender. And, for some reason, the wizards were all happy to see him and all of them shook his hand,calling him 'Mister Potter' (and also something that sounded suspiciously like 'our Hero'). He was never the popular kid back in school, too much of a boy and not enough of a girl, so all of this talking and cheering was a bit of a new experience for him, to be honest, he didn't know if he liked it.

They went to Gringotts, the Wizarding Bank (which was run by Goblins ! Real, proper, goblins !), to get some money, and the bankers made him change the name on his Trust Vault, because he apparently had one. This meant that, to anyone reading financial data about him, there would be no Harriet Potter, just Harry.

This felt like a big win, even if he didn’t really know why.

He got a haircut and bought new clothes that actually fit him at a magical clothing store. Madam Malkins, the manager and owner of the shop, smiled at him as he walked out of the building. And, even more surprising, he had his first social interraction with a kid of his age. Sure the child insulted Hagrid and they may have thrown some harsh words at each other after they did that, but beyond that it went quite well. Harry had never been so friendly with any other teen since, well ... he had _never_ been so friendly with any other teen.

Apart from the blond, he didn’t really meet a lot of people ... and some of the one he did meet, like Ollivander, were real creeps. Sure the man did help him to find a wand (Holly wood and Phoenix feather) but he also compared him to the Dark Lord, who apparently killed his parents.

He was eleven and young so he stayed silent a long time after that, thinking of the life he could have had if his parents were still alive and well. He didn't cry, not in public, but he knew that he would have a lot of trouble falling asleep this night.

Hagrid and him finished the day on an happier note by going to a bookstore (the first the young boy ever went in). By then, Harry had with him a beautiful snow-white owl, his third birthday gift, that he’s pretty sure he was going to name Hedwig. He liked the glint of intelligence in the magnificient bird's eyes and he thanked Hagrid profusely for his present, even if it did nothing to heal the damage learning the truth about his parents had done to his good mood.

He bought a lot of magic books, especially the ones that are about Transfiguration, because one can dream, but he never entirely forgot the empty feeling in his heart.

His parents were killed and until now he tought that they had abandonned him, dying cowardly and leaving him behind.

The truth is they were killed while trying to save him and that only makes him sadder.

 xXx

In the end, he only manages to read half of his school books. It’s not his fault, really ! It’s just that his Transfiguration texts are amazing ! Sure Charms and Defence look great, even on paper, but it’s just so much more fun to try and change an object into another thing entirely. And it’s hard work so, every time he manages to do it, he feels extremely proud of himself, which is unusual for him.

He's motivated and, two weeks after buying his school stuff, he succeeds into turning a match into a needle, a proper one with the pointy ends and everything. And, the day after that, he turns a sock into a silky handkerchief and a pen into a feather and back. In fact, there is only one problem : the incantations are all weird and complicated. He keeps trying to do it without them but if he does that, it only works a time out of three, and it is much weaker.

But he tries and tries again and it’s not really easy but he thinks that, somewhere along the line, he has figured the basics out : the key is to imagine the target of the spell as a different object and to will this picture into existence, make it take the place of the original. It’s a mix between willpower, imagination, and pure magic, which is probably why he can do this without using the entire incantations and sometimes without using them at all. In fact, the only difficulties he has are the details but, if he focuses long enough, he is able to refine his mental pictures and, by the first of September, he’s able to transform a lot of small objects into a lot of other small objects, as long as they share some sort of similarity it’s easy.

Time flies and, a month after his visit to Diagon Alley, Vernon drops him at King’s Cross. The ride is tense and they stay silent the whole way. Before he leaves, he can see his uncle frowning at his clothes and hair, as if he took it as a personnal insult. His reaction amuses him so Harry grins and waves at him, even if he know his insolence will have consequences at the end of the school year. Vernon has a surprisingly good memory for this kind of stuff.

Later, he finds a magic train behind a magic wall and everything is great.

 xXx

“You are Harriet Potter, aren’t you ?”

Harry looks up from the socks Ron and Neville had been trying to turn red for the last ten minutes. Hermione is studying him with her lips pursed and a puzzled expression upon her face, he tries to smile at her but only manages to grimace unseductively, which make both of them uncomfortable.

They stay silent for a moment.

“I saw the scar,” she states eventually, “you’re a girl, your name is Harriet.”

She tilts her head on one side and he looks down at his knees and bites his tongue. Hard. He doesn’t answer, hoping that she would leave him alone. Until now, no one had bothered him with the whole ‘Harriet Potter’ thing and he would have liked it to stay that way. The less he has to talk about his identity, the better he feels. 

Neville looks at the two of them, confused.

“Hermione,” he says, “Harry is a boy, he said he's one.

\- But in the book I just read it's said that Harriet Potter is a girl !

\- Well, if Harry thinks he's a boy then he is, no ?" answered Neville in an even tone, stating it as if it were an evidence.

Both Harry and Hermione turn so fast toward him that their necks crack. The-Boy-Who-Lived opens his mouth to say something, close it. He can’t believe that Neville, sweet and timid Neville, just said that, almost like he found it to be a normal thing to declare in front of people he met only a few hours ago. He feels strange, confused. No one had ever known what he really thought about himself, because he feared that they would react like Vernon did when he met those two men some years ago : with hate and a lot of punches, and he doesn't like punches, but now, there is no punches and there is no hate.

“B … But …” stutters Hermione.

Ron frowns, Neville does the same, Harry is just panicking.

“B … But …” repeats Hermione.

She looks at Harry, he looks back at her and smiles tentatively, she hesitates a moment, frown, then smile back.

And, even if she doesn't stop staring at him all the way to the castle, she is making efforts and even try to ask him some questions. Of course, Ron and Neville are helping, acting as if Hermione is the weird one for not thinking that, obviously, Harry has to be a boy. And him, even if he is an idiot for thinking it, believes that everything will turn out just fine eventually.

As he stands under the ever changing sky of the Great Hall of Hogwarts, he looks at his new friends and sees Hagrid giving him a thumbs up from the side of the teacher's table. It's weird how everyone is nice to him here, maybe he’s just very lucky and he only meets people who accept him or maybe it’s a wizard thing. He doesn’t dare to hope too much though. He already knows three people that see him as Harry and not as Harriet. It’s enough, more than enough.

He can do with three.

When Professor Mc Gonagall calls the name ‘Harry Potter’ during the Sorting Ceremony, he most definitely cries.

And he doesn’t care about it at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so ... yeah.  
> I don't know how many people will read this. But what I do know is that there is not enough fanfiction with trans characters in it ... aaaaand ... that I need to get better at speaking english so I just mixed the two together and here is the result !  
> I never actually wrote anything in english except for, like, 300 words for an english test some months ago. I'm not a natural english speaker, and I think that this shows in the way I write, so I probably made a bazillion of mistakes that I didn't manage to find and correct.  
> Yeh so anyway. I wanted to create a queer friendly Wizarding World with a lot of non-cis and non-het people. This is probably an one-shot, but I have quite a few ideas for a sequel so ... yeah ... you're probably gonna hear about me and my weird Harry Potter AU soon.  
> Or not, I do have very important exams in only a few months.  
> But still, this was a really good exercise and I think I've gotten a bit better at writing in english. Not that I was really good before since, like I said, I never actually did it.  
> Hope you enjoyed this short story !


End file.
